Dearest pet

While our love for animals is extolled as noble and 'natural', all erotic elements in the relationship between humans and other species are vilified and proscribed, thus consigning them to the realm of exotic pornography or crude innuendo.

Even so, something remains of physical love for animals.

In different forms, sublimated or occasionally celebrated, its traces can be found throughout art and popular culture: in Leda and the Swan, Beauty and the Beast or the Lorelei; in a lubricious menagerie of satyrs and centaurs, wolfmen and vampires, all the way through to King Kong and Fritz the Cat, pony clubs and

amorous dolphins, or even advertisements for luxury catfoods.

Dearest Pet uncovers and explores those traces, illuminating the ambivalence of human attitudes to cross-species sexuality.

Its author, the biologist and broadcaster Midas Dekkers, has analysed bestiality in all its aspects - physical, psychological and legal - and examined its representations in religion and mythology, art and literature, pornography and advertising.

Beautifully - and sometimes bizarrely - illustrated, his book is neither drily academic nor pruriently trivial, but erudite, witty and challenging: the first history of the last taboo. A book for animal lovers, and for those who are just their good friends.